The Dogs of Winter Read Online Free Page B

industry was a matter of debate between them.
    The old man was some time in studying the horizon.
    “Frank tells me he asked you to dance with them this year.”
    “He did,” Travis said. In fact, he was somewhat nonplussed at having been asked and was unsure what to do about it.
    “They want you to bring the beads.”
    “They do.”
    The beads had belonged to Travis’s grandmother. She had been a shaman of some repute.
    “You going to do it?”
    “I don’t know.”
    It was a ten-day affair. The Jump Dance. A ritual to make war on evil.
    “Why not?”
    Travis shrugged. To go would require fasting. A certain purity of thought. “I don’t know if I’m up for it or not,” he said.
    The old man laughed at him.
    “Frank seems to think you should do it.”
    “Frank’s a preacher. He’s looking for converts.”
    “Timing might not be so bad. You get them to invite the Yuroks, you go dance with them, you might get them to agree on something.”
    “I don’t think it works that way.”
    “How does it work?”
    “Sometimes I wonder.”
    The old man spit to the windward. “Lots of stiff-necked bastards, you ask me.”
    “Who’s asking?”
    The old man just looked at him.
    “Walk up the street,” Travis said. “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”
    •  •  •
    Travis and his father drank their coffee, sitting opposite one another on the brick planters which marked the entrance to the town’s single strip-mall. For all the talking they did, they might have been a pair of founding fathers effigiated in stone and set before this mall which was itself a kind of monument, erected upon that wave of enthusiasm which had accompanied the coming of the state correctional facility to Scorpion Bay. The mall was home to a dozen businesses, one of them the office of the Northern California Indian Development Council and Travis’s place of employment.
    Travis watched as a pair of brothers, Bill and Tom Jenkins, parked in front of Ned’s doughnut shop and got out of their truck. They were men Travis had gone to school with and on this morning they were up early, dressed for the river in hip boots and coveralls. Travis raised a hand. The brothers nodded in his direction. He watched them with some degree of melancholy. There was a time when they might have invited him along. A time when he might have accepted. Those days had passed. There was new money in Sweet Home. There were new tensions. There were also old wounds. It was the old wounds in which Travis had come to traffic and his life had grown more solitary in consequence.
    He watched as the men left the shop and drove away. They had not gone more than a block before he heard honking. He believedhe heard a man’s voice as well, a catcall set before the morning. He turned to the sounds.
    What he saw there was a woman. She was tall and willowy, and even from the distance at which he first saw her, he knew her to be Kendra Harmon. She was walking toward them along a gray sidewalk still damp from the night’s rain, and with the passing of the truck, the crack of her boot heels was all that could be heard. She passed without a word and if she had recognized Travis, which well she might, Travis could not see it, as her eyes were covered by a pair of tiny, wire-rimmed dark glasses. She wore a ball cap as well, a black one, with her hair pulled out the hole in back and the bill pulled low over her face, as if there was someone from whom she was trying to hide.
    Travis watched as she entered the mall. He saw her look about for a moment and then go up to the door of his office and peer inside.
    “Friend of yours?” the old man asked.
    Travis watched with some surprise. He could not imagine what she was doing there. “She’s married to that surfer,” he said. “The one that rides the big waves up by the Hoof.”
    “One that got bit.”
    Travis nodded. He had, on the occasion of Drew’s taking possession of his inheritance, dined with them in their shack on the